Thesis (M.A.R.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-94).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 85).

My dissertation provides the first full-length study of representations of domestic material culture in contemporary Canadian women's fiction. The first chapter presents two metaphors, the elephant in the living room, and the open secret, and indicates their usefulness in explaining the cultural and critical tendency to overlook the meanings communicated by contemporary domestic material objects and spaces. Drawing on cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken's research into the role of consumption in the preservation of hopes and ideals, the second chapter examines gendered patterns of consumption in Joan Barfoot's first two novels. I suggest that Barfoot's female protagonists reject their suburban homes out of an awareness of the ways these spaces function as repositories of values with which they can no longer live. In the third chapter, I situate my discussion of the Hardoy, or "butterfly chair," in Marion Quednau's novel of the same name, against the backdrop of twentieth-century design debates between modernists and traditionalists. The chair is the object in which the novel's main tensions, which relate to notions of comfort, history, and authority, are embedded. In the fourth chapter I maintain that the central concerns of Diane Schoemperlen's fiction are couched in her representations of domestic material culture. Interpersonal relationships are consistently represented in her fiction as mediated through domestic objects and spaces. Her characters' struggles over issues of control, and the ambivalence characteristically associated with these struggles, often materialize in their manipulations of their domestic environments. Such manipulations make explicit the process of self-fashioning via material culture which every individual engages in on a daily basis, albeit at the level of the tacit.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / This PhD thesis explores the Aotearoa / New Zealand influence in the post-World War II writing of English author, Anna Kavan. In response to her provocatively worded 1943 Horizon-published article on the socio-cultural features of that country, I sought evidence of the source of her apparent disdain. Imperialist in tone and disparaging of the post-colonial Other, the article contributed to the reflective dialectic of national identity of her temporary home. The discovery of unpublished and not previously discussed short stories, written during Kavan’s stay in Aotearoa / New Zealand, revealed a contrarily positive perspective, and offered an anomalous body of material that illuminate the early wartime experiences of the residents of Auckland's North Shore. Comparison between the stories in the manuscript and work published by Kavan since World War II exposed the compellingly autobiographical nature of her writing. This revelation was underscored by a second discovery, that of a previously-unseen cache of correspondence, letters sent from Kavan to her Aotearoa / New Zealand lover, the conscientious objector and author, Walter [Ian] Hamilton. The letters, unpublished short stories, and published work, collectively manifest an intertextuality which reinforces their status as autobiographical. Close analysis has determined that much of Kavan's 'fiction’ is in fact thinly disguised life-writing, a construct which would otherwise be unnoticed, in the absence of back-grounding evidence. This thesis further proves Kavan's authorial appropriation of thematic aspects of the Aotearoa / New Zealand vocabulary, geography, and historical aesthetic. The thesis also corrects extant inaccurate biographical material, particularly with respect to the years 1939 - 1943. Discovery of a small collection of photographs, featuring Kavan in a New Zealand context, has added impetus to the move to install her as a transient constituent on the continuum of New Zealand literature.

Surrealism is dead. At any rate, that is the conclusion one might be tempted to draw in England. In France and America interest in the movement has been kept alive by intermittent discussion; but in England this has not been the case. In the latter country, little critical thought has been applied to the subject, apparently, since the middle of the thirties. This present thesis constitutes an attempt to fill the gap. In examining surrealism both before and after its overt eclat in England, I hope to put it into meaningful historical perspective ; this may help in arriving at the essence of the overt, by penetrating the sensationalism that has hitherto tended to obscure it.

This thesis is a literary biography. It incorporates material that is often outside the scope of scholarly or academic writing: the detail of an individual's day-to-day life. It also spans several disciplines: the fine arts, their history and theory, literary history and criticism, ecology, philosophy, classical music and general history. The discussion involved these because the biographical subject had an active interest at times an active involvement in them. There has been an attempt to follow through themes and patterns that were enduring in the life of A.R.D. Fairburn. He is shown as a man who saw the world in vitalistic and metaphysical terms, rather than in terms of their opposites – mechanism and materialism. These views he represented consistently in a secular society that had a predominantly scientific world view. He is treated as a Romantic/Modernist where his poetry is discussed, and as a pivotal figure in New Zealand's literary history; one who helped make the transition from Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian poetic idioms to those of a regional Modernism, within which he developed a unique style. The biography has implicit in it an 'argument', though not one that is developed in an abstract way: namely that Fairburn, his grandfather Edwin and his great-grandfather, William, were peculiarly representative figures in our history. Their active New Zealand presence lasts from l8l9-1957. Two of them played direct roles in establishing a settler culture here; the third was acutely aware of the tensions and contradictions of that culture. Though A.R.D. and Edwin Fairburn were eccentric in the social milieu of New Zealand, their lives touched it in so many ways that they, along with their missionary forebear, William Thomas Fairburn, are personifications in an historical narrative. The line of their lives traces much in the history of the country since the early nineteenth century. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

"'The English of this wildernesse': aspects of early New England's literary inheritance, as illustrated by the works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor." Since the late 1920's, the literature of early New England has been increasingly studied in the context of the development of American history, literature, and mythology. Without denying the usefulness of such a context, I want to redress the balance by setting selected aspects of two writers in particular, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, in the context of their English origins, and to study them specifically as English provincial writers who exemplify the important phenomenon of cultural lag in a community distant from but crucially attached to a changing metropolitan culture. Part of the originality of my approach is the new look I give to the implications of colonial and provincial literature. Chapter one outlines a detailed historical and critical context for my study. As well, I discuss some of the roots and presuppositions of modern literary scholarship of Early New England, and using T. S. Eliot's distinction between "aesthetic" and "merely historical" criticism, I stress the need for an evaluative context for the early New England poets to complement any discussion of historical perspective. In my second chapter, I tackle crucial and inadequately examined aspects of the influence of Puritanism on New England poetry, concentrating especially on the theological distrust of the imagination and (especially important for Taylor) the literary implications of eucharistic theology. Having developed the major strands of my approach, I then turn to Bradstreet (chapters three to six) and Taylor (chapters seven to nine). Chapter three discusses Anne Bradstreet in the context of Renaissance attitudes to women, in order to show what expectations and possibilities existed for a woman in her position to write poetry. Chapters four and five gradually move from an historical to an evaluative perspective - chapter four to deal with her public poetry, chapter five with her domestic verse and chapter six, her religious poetry. Chapters seven to nine are devoted to selected aspects of Taylor's work. Chapter seven attempts to make a new evaluation of his contribution to the Metaphysical literary tradition; chapter eight explores the implications of his religious beliefs for his poetic practices and especially his constant sense of literary inadequacy. In chapter nine, the crucial question of the relative importance of "historical" and "critical" contexts is again faced as I look at Taylor's poems on the Canticles, not in order to examine his sources, but rather to show the ways in which his poetical imagination responded to and transformed his sources. There is a brief concluding chapter. Throughout the study, I have responded to the great amount of critical and scholarly work done in recent years, and I have therefore concentrated on particular aspects of the topic which, if in no case providing me with totally untouched territory to map, at least have offered the chance of meaningful and original exploration. I also hope that I am offering my explorations within an original and provoking cultural and critical context.

Hardy’s visual imagery reveals both the eye of the draughtsman and the eye of the artist. His style ranges from awkward pedantries to flowing poetic beauty. This PhD thesis first examines the eccentric scientific imagery, and then the more sustained poetic visual themes such as the ‘near’ and ‘far’ view, or the use of light and shade. Hardy’s reference to paintings, etchings and sculptures is examined in detail, with illustrations provided throughout the text. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / The French farce of the period 1450-1550 contains a cornucopia of verbal expressions that we may term 'exclamatory’; swearing, oaths, curses, insults, supplications, interjections, exhortations, scatology, invocations of saints, and so on. Yet this literary form, considered by researchers be a repository of spoken French of the later Middle Ages, remains largely unexplored from this standpoint. Indeed, there are few studies of 'expressive' modern language in existence, due largely to the inferior status given to this linguistic register by the majority of researchers. This thesis seeks to examine and quantify the formulaic nature of exclamatory discourse in the farces. By adopting a broader definition of the word 'exclamation' than that currently accepted, we seek to unite the disparate and fragmentary attitudes of the few researchers who have expressed the view that this aspect of discourse merits further analysis. It is asserted that examination of formulae (i.e. leitmotivic usages) allows an objective assessment of affective language; the formulaic constructions are shown to be themselves subject to formulaic modification. A database of 7668 quotations (68,500 words) from 99 farces is used to establish a taxonomy which shows usage in context. The taxonomy is organised around headwords, which form the nuclei of the various expressive domains. From this taxonomy, 858 formulae are extracted and described. The relative frequency of occurrence of the phrases in the taxonomy is portrayed in graphical form. The field of research from 1900 to the present is examined. The attitudes of researchers are shown to have undergone evolutionary rather than revolutionary development in the course of the century; the abovementioned divergence of methodologies (and definitions of the field of research), is asserted to have hindered an advance of research in this area. Possibilities for further research are suggested, for example in the field of comparative inter-lingual studies.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / This thesis establishes a critical edition of the diaries of Geneviève Bréton (1849-l9l8) written between 1874 and 1914. As 'diary' and 'journal' are synonyms, the words are used interchangeably throughout the thesis. Geneviève Bréton was an educated, privileged and literary woman, the third child in a prestigious Parisian family. In this thesis, I argue that her diaries or private writing play the role of an alternative to, for a woman, socially stigmatized public writing. Although she wrote compulsively throughout her life, experimenting with the novel, she devotes most attention to the diary genre, exploring it beyond its conventional parameters as a feminine outlet. Diaries provide a compromise for Bréton as she finds a way around the limitations imposed by sexual difference and cultural mores in nineteenth-century France. As a woman, and as a wife, she accepts the social and cultural imperatives of her environment but, where possible, on her own terms. I argue that for Bréton, the daughter of publishers and friend of writers, the diary genre is a surreptitious entry into their world, her private form of literary expression and creation. I suggest that she recognises this fact at the end of her life when she herself undertakes the preparation of her 1867-1871 journals for publication. The 1874-l9l4 diaries are held in manuscript form in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The first five years of the diaries, based on the material prepared by Bréton, were published in 1985. The present work will facilitate further publications. The corpus of the later diaries, transcribed over a four-year period in the National Library archives in Paris, is preceded by a three-part introduction: a presentation and discussion of the methodology chosen to transcribe the diaries; an analysis of the nineteenth-century family, social, and literary contexts that influence the writing; and the development of a thesis on the rationale behind the existence of the diaries, their character, content, and volume. Bréton began the task of editing and retyping her journals. This edition of the subsequent journals carries on the undertaking of 'publishing and republishing Silenced texts' Julia Swindells, 'Liberating the Subject? Autobiography and "Women's History": A Reading of the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick' in The Personal Narratives Group eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, 1989, p.24.: that of drawing out the untold stories of creativity and rebellion against confinement which are part of history and literary history.